World Religions News

(RNS) — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just reported its highest convert growth in history. Over the weekend at its semiannual General Conference, the church released its 2025 membership statistics that indicate an almost 25% increase in convert baptisms in 2025, compared to 2024.

But at the same time, 2025 data from the Cooperative Election Study, also made available last week, tells a different story. In the United States at least, fewer adults are self-identifying as Latter-day Saints than at any other time since the survey began nearly 20 years ago.

Both of these stories are true. But how? Let’s dive into the data, starting with the church’s rosy internal membership numbers.

A surge of growth

Each April, the LDS Church releases its global statistics about the number of members, congregations, missionaries, enrolled students and temples it has. There have been some extremely lean years in the last decade, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. A decade ago this month, I wrote a column about how Mormon growth had slowed to its lowest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2016, year-over-year growth was just 1.7% — an alarming downturn for a denomination that used to report 5% growth a year.

But things got worse. Growth technically remained in positive territory by hovering around 1% a year but wasn’t keeping pace with worldwide population growth. And during the pandemic, church growth slowed to just six-tenths of a percentage point a year, likely largely due to missionary activity being stalled by COVID-19.

Things began turning around in 2022, though many people (myself included) thought this might have been a post-COVID-19 blip, reflecting a temporary backlog of deferred missionary service and baptisms. I expected that things would soon return to “normal” (i.e., slow), given global trends toward secularization.

But the turnaround has persisted and has gotten even better. Here are some of the main highlights from the church’s 2025 report:

• The church baptized 385,490 new converts from around the world in 2025. That’s an almost 25% increase over 2024 and the highest-ever rate of convert baptisms in a single year in the history of the church. The previous record was from 1990, when 330,490 converts joined.
• The church now has 17.9 million members and is on track to hit 18 million this year.
• The growth has been fueled by an increased volunteer missionary force. More than 78,000 proselytizing missionaries served in 2025, in addition to more than 36,000 service missionaries. All told, the church had over 114,000 missionaries serving in various capacities.

Time will tell us more about the longevity of this upturn and why it is happening. But I think two contexts are helpful for understanding the renewal.

The first is that organized religion is starting to have a moment, even in areas of long-term religious decline and more recent decline (such as the United States). It’s overblown to call this a revival yet, but there are signs of life. For example, RNS reported that Roman Catholic churches in the U.S. are now receiving a surprising number of adult converts who have gone through Christian initiation classes. Many were welcomed into Catholic churches at Easter vigil services this weekend.

This is not a reversal of overall trends in the U.S., especially since the youngest generations continue to be the least religious. Demographically, that’s not a foolproof recipe for religious revival. But several years of data from several national surveys now show that the “rise of the nones” has slowed down. Statistician Ryan Burge reported last week that the share of Americans who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” declined for the third straight year, from a high of 36.2% in 2022 to 31.8% in 2025, according to the Cooperative Election Study.

The second contextual item I’d point to is that the LDS Church has smoothed the way for its impressive missionary force by investing heavily in social media advertising around the world. And I do mean heavily — these ads often show good-looking young missionaries from the church without actually spelling out which church is sponsoring the ads. They have the appearance of being created by grassroots, local groups of Christians rather than by the highly centralized LDS missionary department.

For example, check out the Instagram page for Followers of Christ — PNW. It depicts a mostly generic, upbeat Christian message. Visitors can consider questions about their lives — like, “Do you struggle with mental illness?” — and find comfort in healing memes. Sometimes these memes are optimistic, feel-good messages about self-esteem and faith in God. Occasionally they have a quote from a church leader, who is identified by first and last name but not by the name of the church.

Even the account’s “About us” section neglects to identify the actual name of the church. In six Instagram stories, it says the account was created by “people just like you” — Jesus-followers who love Washington and Idaho, who can help you by sharing a message of peace and hope.

It’s a genius move, marketing-wise, to erase the Mormon/LDS brand name in favor of a cheerful, non-denominational Christian calling card. Non-denominational Christianity has been one of the few growth areas of religion in the United States and abroad.

I can confirm that, in my own LDS ward, we’ve had recent converts who first met missionaries because they answered an ad on social media. I spoke with one last week who clicked on a link to have people come and pray with her, and the LDS missionaries showed up. She began attending sacrament meetings and told me that her overall emotional and physical health have been improving ever since. God is good, she said.

A retention problem

I really liked this new convert, and I hope she stays active in our ward. We’ve seen a steady uptick in baptisms in the last two years, but relatively few of those new folks continue coming.

My ward is not alone in this. And this is the other half of the story I alluded to earlier. Shortly before the church released its glowing annual report about global growth, the Cooperative Election Study released 2025 data showing a steady decline in Americans who self-identify as LDS/Mormon. In 2025, this dipped below the 1% mark for the first time, to 0.9% of the U.S. population.

The CES’s numbers used to be close to the church’s own membership numbers, which have stayed mostly flat in proportion to the overall U.S. population. This means that the church’s internal records of everyone still on the official rolls put the LDS share of the population right around 2% consistently for the last 20 years.

The CES, by contrast, counts only those adults who self-report that they’re Latter-day Saints. And that population has been nearly cut in half over the same period.

Researcher Alex Bass of Mormon Metrics said the 2025 CES had only 161 LDS respondents out of the total sample of 17,000 people, the lowest LDS sample size to date. This creates “more uncertainty compared to previous CES years,” he cautioned.

Still, the 2025 numbers continue the overall trend. The gap continues to widen between the church’s records of how many U.S. members are on the rolls and the national data of how many Americans actually say they are LDS.  

A lot of this is driven by people leaving the church in the U.S. Most who leave don’t remove their names from the official records, so the church still counts them as members even though they may no longer see themselves as such.

So, there you have it: a very encouraging internal church report about LDS baptisms around the world, alongside a mostly discouraging independent report about the decline of LDS membership in the U.S. specifically.

But it’s not wholly discouraging. Bass said that among the CES respondents in the U.S. who still regard themselves as LDS church members, the last two years of data have shown a small uptick in their religious behaviors. There’s an increase in members who pray several times a day, say religion is very important in their lives and attend church at least once a week.

Bass will unpack those findings in greater detail in a future Mormon Metrics Substack. Overall though, he said the tentative finding that LDS religiosity is increasing while its population share goes down “may suggest that some of the people on the fringes are leaving.”

(RNS) — By any measure, the Holy Week in Jerusalem was eerily quiet as a result of restrictions imposed by Israel against large gatherings due to the U.S.-Israel war in Iran. 

On Palm Sunday, the Latin Patriarch, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, was barred by Israeli police from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. And on Easter Sunday (April 5), the cardinal and other Catholic leaders performed Easter rites to empty pews at the Holy Sepulchre, which remained closed to the public. Holy Thursday and Good Friday celebrations were also held without the public. 

As Orthodox Christians prepare to celebrate Pascha, the Orthodox Easter, on Sunday (April 12), Palestinian Christian communities are concerned about how Israel’s control over Jerusalem’s sacred sites and restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to leave the West Bank will impact their ability to live out their faith.

“It’s such an important event in the life of the community. It’s degrading our ability to live our Christian life and to provide a Christian witness,” said Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, a Russian Orthodox nun involved in Holy Land ministries since the 1990s.

The traditional Palm Sunday procession of thousands of Christians who march from Beit Fajr near Bethlehem to the church was canceled for the first time in years due to the church’s closure and Palestinian Christians’ difficulties in reaching Jerusalem. The procession, during which pilgrims sing and wave palm leaves along the 12-mile path, commemorates Jesus’ triumphal return to Jerusalem before his crucifixion.

George Rishmawi, the vice president of the Arab Orthodox Cultural Club of Beit Sahour, a Christian village in the West Bank, said the journey was strewn with obstacles. Palestinians have to demand a permit to visit Jerusalem on the Al-Munasiq app, introduced by Israeli authorities in 2020, and go through numerous Israeli checkpoints before reaching the holy city, he said. 

“Palestinian Christians used to go to Jerusalem to celebrate Palm Sunday, and now there is no way you can get there,” he said. “I can see Jerusalem from my home, but I didn’t go there for a long time.”

Next week, a day before Pascha, leaders of the Eastern Orthodox Church, one of the largest denominations among Palestinian Christians, will hold the Descent of the Holy Fire ceremony, in which the Greek Orthodox Patriarch enters Jesus’ tomb and emerges with a lit candle, which Christians believe is a miraculous manifestation of Jesus’ presence. The flame is then passed to the faithful. Though previous ceremonies have drawn thousands of pilgrims, who gather in the church’s tabernacles and on its balconies, only 50 people will be allowed. “It’s absurd to think that only five (50)  people will be allowed in the church,” said Stephanopoulos, who frequently attended the ceremony.

Restricted access to the Holy Sepulchre highlighted the degree to which Israeli authorities control Palestinians’ freedom of worship and other aspects of their lives, said Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian and political scientist based in Ramallah in the West Bank.

According to a report that Abu Eid helped draft of the Balasan Initiative for Human Rights, a Palestinian human rights group, Israel has sought to undermine the status quo on Christian sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem through coercive financial measures, the confiscation of religious property and changes to the use of religious sites.

In recent years, during Ramadan especially, Israel has also tightened control over access to the Al-Aqsa compound, Islam’s third-holiest site, where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. Israel has restricted access to the compound to men over 55, women over 50 and children under 12 accompanied by an adult. Nearly 10,000 were allowed to pray at the mosque for this year’s Eid al-Fitr.  

The Israeli government cited security concerns due to past violent incidents at the compound to justify the restrictions. Palestinian advocates say they’re part of a broader effort to gain control over the site, which sits right next to the Temple Mount, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. 

“Israel wants to change the facts on the ground, and who is the authority over the holy sites,” Stephanopoulos said. “They want to change the status quo so that the Israeli government is calling the shots at the holy sites.” 

The erosion of the status quo poses an existential threat to Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land, Abu Eid warns. Palestinian Christians, who represent nearly 1% of the West Bank population, have migrated out of Palestine at a higher rate than Palestinian Muslims, bringing the community to nearly 50,000. Since Israel began its military campaign in the Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, the number of Palestinian Christians in the territory has sharply decreased. Israeli strikes killed nearly 72,000 Palestinians and caused damage to two of Gaza’s most important churches, the Holy Family Church and the Church of Saint Porphyrius. 

In the West Bank, the growing number of attacks perpetrated by Jewish settlers, whose presence in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank is deemed illegal under international law, has also pushed Palestinian communities to curtail religious celebrations, Rishmawi, of the Arab Orthodox Cultural Club, said. 

In 2025, attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinians and Israeli forces rose by 27% compared to the previous year, according to the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet security agency. 

“Now, with these conditions, we have no appetite to go out and do much more,” said Rishmawi, who noted that, for safety reasons, most Eastern Orthodox celebrations for Easter will be held in churches. “We don’t make big celebrations.”

In January, Jewish settlers established the Yatziv community around Beit Sahour, further threatening the Palestinian Christian presence in the area, said Fares Abraham, a Palestinian-American who leads Levant Ministries, a nonprofit advocating for Palestinian Christians. 

The construction brought road closures and new checkpoints and put pressure on already scarce water resources, effectively isolating Beit Sahour, a majority-Christian village, he said. “From a Palestinian Christian point of view, it feels like a broader system of restrictions … not just limiting movement, but slowly eroding the ability of a community to live, to thrive, to worship, to teach and to remain rooted in the land,” said Abraham.

In such conditions, Palestinian Christians are worried about their ability to maintain their presence in the West Bank in the years to come, Rishmawi said. 

“We are the mother church of all churches. We are the guardians of the faith on the ground in Palestine. And we are also the bridge between Palestine and the world.” 

LONDON (AP) — On a gray afternoon in the days before Easter, a dozen or so schoolchildren straggled into a side building at Rochester Cathedral and began their transformation.

Off went the jackets and backpacks, on came burgundy cassocks and white surplices. Then they trooped into the cathedral, opened their mouths and sang as one. The youthful gaggle had become a choir, giving voice to a tradition of choral music in the Church of England that has survived largely unchanged for almost 500 years.

“I think for me, it’s one of the sounds of our country,’’ said Adrian Bawtree, the choir’s music director. “All of our cathedrals are beautiful, sacred spaces where you can come and just sit and be and you can be immersed, bathed, nourished, sent out back into the world transformed by an experience in 30 minutes.”

The epitome of that tradition is Choral Evensong, an evening service of hymns, psalms and prayers laid out by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of the Church of England, in 1549. The service is performed by the choir, with the congregation participating simply by listening.

But that tradition is under threat as the demands of modern life, declining church attendance and tight funding make it harder to find and train the next generation of choristers.

Enthusiasts are trying to reverse that, launching a campaign for the government to recognize English choral services as an important part of Britain’s culture under a U.N. program that seeks to protect “intangible cultural heritage,” as well as historic buildings and natural wonders.

Traditions strengthen identity

The U.K. government is seeking nominations for a nationwide inventory of cultural traditions — from Morris dancing to the craft of building dry stone walls — that should be preserved. Protecting such traditions is crucial to strengthen community identity and bolster the U.K. economy as heritage tourism generates billions of pounds in annual spending, the government says.

While many people have been introduced to English choral services through the angelic voices of the choristers in flowing robes and Elizabethan ruffs who sing at royal weddings and carol services, choirs perform every day in much more humble settings.

And many are struggling, according to the Cathedral Music Trust, which was founded in 1956 to stem the decline of church music after World War II. Last year it gave 500,000 pounds ($661,000) to 28 cathedrals and churches around the country.

It can be a lot. Rochester, for example, spends about 250,000 pounds ($330,000) a year on music, a substantial outlay for a provincial cathedral but less than some.

The trust hopes recognition of the English choral tradition will bring attention and much-needed funding to choirs, which it says are an important training ground for the musicians of tomorrow, both religious and secular.

“Whilst it happens every day, it is actually quite fragile,” trust CEO Jonathan Mayes said. “It takes an awful lot of work and it takes a lot of funding to actually make it happen and that doesn’t come without effort.’’

Evensong links the present day to the Protestant Reformation

Preserving Evensong is important historically because the service was instrumental in the development and spread of the modern English language, said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an expert on Christianity and an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford.

The service is based on the Book of Common Prayer, compiled by Cranmer to make English the language of the Church of England after it broke away from the Latin-dominated Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation.

The idea was to create services everyone could be part of.

“It is very much a drama, and it is a drama which has been performed by the people of England from 1549 through to the present day,” MacCulloch said. “It’s far more a vehicle of public consciousness performance than any play of Shakespeare.’’

And while a growing number of choirs including Rochester now take girls as well as boys, in other respects it hasn’t changed much since then.

“The service would be really quite recognizable to Queen Elizabeth I as much as Queen Elizabeth II,” MacCulloch said. “And that’s quite remarkable.”

The power of music to transform lives

Bawtree, the music director at Rochester Cathedral, is one of those working to preserve the tradition as he oversees the youngest singers, aged 9-13, known as choristers, as well as a youth choir for older children. All are backed by professional adult singers.

Bawtree said he was captured by church music the first time he heard an organ play and a choir sing when he was about 9 years old. Now he wants people to know that services like Evensong make it possible for anyone to turn up and listen to beautiful choral music, regardless of their beliefs.

“When I heard it, it was like big octopus arms came and grabbed me and said, ‘You’ve got to be part of this.’ So I think I am trying to speak to that 9-year-old child and saying actually this is something that could speak to most people, if not everyone.

“And because I had that experience, I would like to share that with future generations and be passionate about that,” he said. “We talk in the world of mindfulness and the power of music to transform lives. This is an extraordinary arena where that can happen.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

JDEIDEH, Lebanon (AP) — It was not how the Rev. Maroun Ghafari had envisioned this Holy Week — for years, he had held Easter sermons in his predominantly Christian village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel.

This year, he is preaching from a Beirut suburb, beside a cardboard cutout depicting his church in Alma al-Shaab, now caught in the crossfire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters.

Since hostilities erupted last month between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group — in the shadow of the wider, U.S.-Israeli war on Iran — over 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 1 million have been forced to flee their homes.

Among those displaced from the war-torn south are thousands of Christians. They now find themselves far from their ancestral churches in Lebanon, where Christians have maintained a strong presence through centuries of Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman conquest and plenty of modern-day crises.

Christians are estimated to make up around a third of Lebanon’s population of roughly 5.5 million people. With 12 Christian sects, the country is home to the largest proportion of Christians of any nation in the Arab world.

Despite being far from the strikes in and around their villages in southern Lebanon, they were reminded of the war by the deep rumbling of Israeli jets and the sounds of deadly airstrikes over Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Huddling in a church, hoping for protection

Christian villagers who stayed behind in southern Lebanon, ignoring Israel’s blanket evacuation warnings for the area, have increasingly hardened into enclaves surrounded by fierce clashes.

And though villagers in Alma al-Shaab had been uprooted before, in the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah war, this time around, they were adamant they wouldn’t leave, even as airstrikes came closer and closer.

The villagers huddled in their church for protection as Israeli warplanes pounded large swaths of southern and eastern Lebanon while Israeli troops stepped up a ground invasion and Hezbollah kept firing rockets at Israel.

In his annual Easter homily, Patriarch Beshara al-Rai of Lebanon’s Maronite Church blamed both Hezbollah and Israel for the suffering wrought by the war.

“The country is going through a critical situation due to Iranian interference through Hezbollah and Israeli aggression,” he said. “Our hearts bleed for the victims of the conflict imposed on Lebanon.”

Ghafari’s brother, 70-year-old Sami Ghafari, was among the villagers who sought refuge at the church in Alma al-Shaab.

But he dashed out briefly on March 8 to tend to his garden, and was killed by an Israeli drone strike. His killing prompted the remaining villagers — including his brother — to pack up their belongings.

The U.N. peacekeepers in the area — a force known as UNIFIL that has monitored the region for nearly five decades — evacuated them to the northern suburbs of Beirut.

“We wanted to stay, but it was always possible that one of us could be targeted or killed at any moment,” the Rev. Maroun Ghafari told The Associated Press from St. Anthony Church in the northern Beirut suburb of Jdeideh, where the displaced from Alma al-Shaab came to worship on Saturday.

“Everyone is tired, and we see that war brings nothing but destruction, death and displacement.”

Missing the ‘smell of home’

For many Lebanese Christians, it’s a tradition on Holy Saturday — the day between Good Friday, which commemorates the crucifixion and death of Jesus, and Easter Sunday, which marks his resurrection according to the Gospels — to visit the graves of their loved ones.

This year, displaced Christians could only reflect from afar.

Nabila Farah, dressed in black for the Saturday service at St. Anthony Church, was among the last to leave Alma al-Shaab. She still feels heartbroken, a month later.

“You miss the smell of home, the lovely traditions and customs, the sounds of the bells of three churches ringing,” she said, reminiscing about her village. “As much as we experience the Easter atmosphere here, it will never be as it is over there.”

Those who remain face other challenges.

Marius Khairallah, a priest in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, where much of the Christian community has hunkered down, says that he and his congregants are staying put “not out of stubbornness, but out of a sense of mission, to remain alongside their fellow faithful, as witnesses.”

“A significant number of parishioners have been displaced or are absent,” he said. “Yet churches still open their doors. Prayers are still raised — even with fewer voices.”

Worries are mounting among Christians in the area as the Lebanese army — which seeks to stay neutral in the Israel-Hezbollah war — pulls out from parts of southern Lebanon, leaving them exposed to Israeli forces pushing deeper into the territory.

On top of that, supply stocks are dwindling, and humanitarian access is extremely difficult. A convoy carrying over 40 tons of aid led by the Vatican was supposed to reach the Christian village of Debel, but was canceled for what Lebanon’s Maronite Church said was “security reasons.”

St. Antony’s main priest, the Rev. Dori Fayyad, used his Good Friday sermon to take solemn note of the war’s widening toll on the southern Lebanese Christians, as the faithful recited prayers in Arabic and Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus.

“Today, you understand what the cross means, not as an idea, not as a concept, but because you are going through it,” he told the fully packed pews, the crowd so thick that dozens had to stand or crouch on the back stairs.

Some wiped away tears as Fayyad named one by one the southern churches, illustrated in the cardboard cutouts next to the pulpit.

“These churches in these villages are not only places of worship,” he said. “They are silent witnesses to suffering and to faith.”

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Associated Press video journalist Ali Sharafeddine in Jdeideh, Lebanon, contributed to this report.

(The Conversation) — Toward the end of Netflix’s “Into the Manosphere,” documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux chats in Marbella, Spain, with British influencer Ed Matthews.

“The people who run the world, they don’t have our best intentions,” says Matthews, speaking in the language of the manosphere – where some influencers and viewers believe they have tapped into a deeper truth about reality and power. When Theroux asked who controlled all of that, Matthews shrugged and answered this complex question very simply: “The Jews.”

It’s part of a three-minute digression from the film’s focus on masculinity, with multiple influencers making antisemitic claims about global conspiracies.

The manosphere is a catchall term for websites, forums, blogs and influencers promoting a particular kind of hypermasculinity, from the belief that women and feminism are the cause of men’s problems to calls to legalize rape. Groups within it – including pickup artists, men’s rights groups and “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities – portray themselves as victims of modernity. In their eyes, the global economy is to blame for their unsatisfactory job prospects, feminism is to blame for their failures with women, minority rights are forcing them to relinquish their privilege as straight men, and so on.

And those digital spaces are rife with antisemitism. Some prominent influencers openly deny the Holocaust, call for violence against Jews and spread global conspiracy theories.

As a historian of Jewish gender and antisemitism, I know the connections between misogyny and antisemitism have deep roots. For centuries, a frequent tactic of antisemitism has been to attack Jewish men, deriding their masculinity.

Centuries-old tropes

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 20th century, empires and nations across Europe established laws and practices that held Jewish men apart, not allowing them access to full citizenship. In many areas, Jews were not allowed to vote, to own land, to hold public office, to hold rank in the military or to duel with their peers.

Jewish men chat outside a shop in Krasilov, Ukraine, in the early 1900s.
History & Art Images via Getty Images

Antisemitic rhetoric often portrayed Jewish men as feminine or fragile, and inherently different. Those beliefs extended into the most severe antisemitic tropes and beliefs. For example, the blood libel, which falsely claims that Jews require the blood of gentile children to make their Passover matzo, was frequently linked to a lesser-known antisemitic claim: that Jewish men menstruated and therefore needed the blood of gentiles to replenish themselves. Other antisemitic beliefs claimed that Jews were too weak and cowardly to fight in the military, that they were dominated by Jewish women, or that circumcision made them more akin to women themselves.

The Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger would have fit in well on a manosphere podcast. He excoriated Jewish manhood along with his misogynistic views of women in his 1903 book “Sex and Character.” “Just as in reality there is no such thing as the ‘dignity of women,’ it is equally impossible to imagine a Jewish ‘gentleman,’” he wrote, allowing that even “the most superior woman is still infinitely inferior to the most inferior man.”

American soil

Immigrants to the United States, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, were shaped by these ideas and experiences.

The European Jews who settled in America in the 19th and 20th centuries largely made their way in commerce and trade and tended to settle in cities. At the time, however, the frontier – with its rugged cowboys, miners and railroad men – defined American manhood.

New Jewish arrivals, coming from European nations that had limited Jewish male participation in so many areas, had developed an alternative masculinity, focused on devotion to learning and on “eydlkayt” – a Yiddish word meaning gentleness and sensitivity. After arriving in the U.S., some Jews remained devoted to this form of manhood, but others fought to acculturate and access the more mainstream forms of masculinity they had been barred from in their or their parents’ countries of origin.

One of the earliest of American masculinity influencers was President Theodore Roosevelt, who touted his own transformation from a timid, effeminate man – local presses mocked him in his early career – to a rugged outdoorsman. “The great bulk of the Jewish population … are of weak physique,” he wrote in 1901. Though he blamed this on centuries of oppression, he saw it as a tangible difference discernible in the Jewish body and spirit. Roosevelt advocated a model of redemptive manhood through rugged outdoorsmanship and the strenuous life, and saw masculinity as a means to dominate and control races he deemed inferior.

Jews arguably enjoyed more rights in America than anywhere else in modern times, but they were still excluded from institutions of masculine camaraderie. Well into the 20th century, Jews were restricted from joining prestigious athletic clubs, fraternal societies, high military ranks and country clubs, though some responded by forming their own venues, like the City Athletic Club of New York. Most of these restrictions concluded with the end of Jewish quotas in U.S. higher education in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jewish fraternity brothers, including the author’s great-grandfather, Ezra Sensibar, right, pose for a Northwestern homecoming celebration in Evanston, Ill., in 1923.
Sensibar Family Collection/Miriam Mora

Conspiracies today

Today’s manosphere not only builds on this legacy but also presents something new. Its embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories allows men who see themselves as victims to explain multiple grievances at once without confronting their own shortcomings.

More than two decades ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified a conspiracy theory emerging on the American right: the belief that “cultural Marxists” were intent on destroying American culture. In particular, some proponents blamed Jews for planting progressive ideas and movements, including feminism and gender identity, as part of efforts to weaken white men’s dominance.

This is blatant in the manosphere rhetoric, when figures like Myron Gaines blame Jews for what they see as destructive forces to Western civilization, from feminism and communism to pornography.

Michael Broschowitz, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute’s Center for Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, explains the manosphere’s tilt into antisemitism as the result of three driving forces. First, antisemitism serves as a one-size-fits-all answer, claiming to explain lots of problems at once. Second, algorithms designed to maximize engagement amplify extreme content. Lastly, global online communities can quickly remix antisemitic ideas to fit different cultures.

All three of these explanations are important. But I would argue that there is a crucial piece missing: Masculinity and antisemitism have been traversing the centuries hand in hand. The conspiratorial thinking that blossoms in the manosphere blames Jewish men for weakening masculinity. Because in the manosphere, failures of manhood are never your own.

(Miriam Eve Mora, Managing Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, University of Michigan. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)